iMol is a free molecular visualization app designed for Mac OS X. It provides easy and interactive molecular visualization, serving as a valuable tool for scientists who wish to study molecular models.
If you are a chemist or a molecular biologist, iMol must be part of your essential software collection. It is an efficient and useful molecular visualization application designed for the Mac OS X operating system. The application integrates a wide range of tools to help you load, edit, and render molecules with ease.
One of the remarkable features of iMol is its ability to handle various file formats such as PDB, MOL2, HIN, CAR, ALC, and BIO. As a result, you can load small and large molecules, view and rotate them independently, and save your edited files as PDB or BIO files. The BIO file stores all view and rendering settings, such as colors, lighting, and orientation of molecules for future use.
Additionally, the software enables you to measure angles, torsional angles, and distances between atoms, as well as superimpose and calculate RMSD between atom coordinates. You can also align protein chains to detect the regions with high structural similarity.
When rendering molecules, iMol provides you with an array of options ranging from wires, points, Van der Waals spheres, balls and sticks, polygons, strands, ribbon, cartoons, spring, tube to ladder. You also have access to various predefined color schemes such as secondary structure and hydrophobicity, custom colors, and different materials such as plastic, metal, and glass.
The OpenGL graphics incorporated in the software makes displaying molecules fascinating and dynamic, with the ability to render images as bitmap, PostScript or POV-Ray file. iMol implements several rendering effects such as automatic rotation, motion blur, depth cueing, background gradient, perspective, and stereo projection (using both side-by-side and red/blue anaglyph methods). The application also allows you to fine-tune several rendering parameters.
The software has some minimum hardware requirements, including G3 400MHz processor or better, 128 MB RAM, OpenGL accelerator, and at least 8 MB of video RAM. These requirements are not too demanding, and the cost of using the software is the time required to learn how to use it effectively. Overall, iMol is a top-notch software for molecular visualization suitable for researchers, educators, and students.
One of the remarkable features of iMol is its ability to handle various file formats such as PDB, MOL2, HIN, CAR, ALC, and BIO. As a result, you can load small and large molecules, view and rotate them independently, and save your edited files as PDB or BIO files. The BIO file stores all view and rendering settings, such as colors, lighting, and orientation of molecules for future use.
Additionally, the software enables you to measure angles, torsional angles, and distances between atoms, as well as superimpose and calculate RMSD between atom coordinates. You can also align protein chains to detect the regions with high structural similarity.
When rendering molecules, iMol provides you with an array of options ranging from wires, points, Van der Waals spheres, balls and sticks, polygons, strands, ribbon, cartoons, spring, tube to ladder. You also have access to various predefined color schemes such as secondary structure and hydrophobicity, custom colors, and different materials such as plastic, metal, and glass.
The OpenGL graphics incorporated in the software makes displaying molecules fascinating and dynamic, with the ability to render images as bitmap, PostScript or POV-Ray file. iMol implements several rendering effects such as automatic rotation, motion blur, depth cueing, background gradient, perspective, and stereo projection (using both side-by-side and red/blue anaglyph methods). The application also allows you to fine-tune several rendering parameters.
The software has some minimum hardware requirements, including G3 400MHz processor or better, 128 MB RAM, OpenGL accelerator, and at least 8 MB of video RAM. These requirements are not too demanding, and the cost of using the software is the time required to learn how to use it effectively. Overall, iMol is a top-notch software for molecular visualization suitable for researchers, educators, and students.
What's New
Version 0.40: N/A